Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I'm going to show
you how you can recolor an image using selective color adjustment in Photoshop.
The image that we're going to work on here is this image. And I want this green
color to actually be a sort of gray blue,
so we're going to recolor the image using selective color in Photoshop.
As always I'm going to duplicate the background layer because that gives me just a
little bit more flexibility,
and I'm going to add an adjustment layer, Layer New Adjustment Layer, and we're
going to use Selective Color.
One of the benefits of selective Color is that it allows us to select a
color from the image and affect it.
So we're going to start with
the greens
because there's some green and some yellow in this area of the image. So
let's go and pick up the greens and see how we can affect them.
We have sliders here for Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.
The opposite to Cyan and Cyan is a sort of blue color and if we drag in
this direction we'll add cyan to the image.
The opposite of Cyan is Red so if we drag in this direction we're actually
going to add red to the image.
I'm just going to switch to the yellow layer because there's actually more yellow in this green in
the background. I just want to show you this a little more clearly.
This is the bluey color and this is the red color. So because we want to go
towards a blue we're actually going to add some cyan to the yellows here.
Then we're going to add or subtract magenta.
When we add magenta we're adding a sort of
pinky color to the image.
When we're subtracting magenta we're actually adding green so the opposite of
magenta is green.
The jury is out on exactly what we're going to do with the magenta slider, but
I'm thinking we're probably about there right now.
Now this is where we'll get some real action because adding yellow to the image
will make it more yellow.
And in our case it's just canceling the cyan that we added to it.
But the opposite of yellow is blue,
so if we drag in this direction here's our beautiful blue.
We've killed the ends of our knitting needles but everything else is looking really
good right now. So let's just tweak the magenta channel to see if we can get a
better blue. So I'm thinking that's sort of perhaps more the blue that I want.
And then let's go back to the green channel and see if anything that we do
here will impact it.
It seems that most of the color in that wool was actually in the yellow channel not
in the green, so you may want to look at associated channels when you're changing
colors because sometimes the channel that you think has the color in actual
fact doesn't. And in fact this green channel is not helping us at all.
So yellows is where most of the color was. There may have been some color
in the cyan channel, so let's just go and see if cyan is going to affect this image
at all. No, it's not giving an
affect here at all. So we're going to call that all yellow and call that all good.
So now that I've finished with that I'm just going to close down the dialogue.
And so this is what we started with green
and now we've got the blue color that we want. The only problem is that our knitting
needles have been killed in the process. So let's go and grab the knitting
needle.
And we can quickly make a selection of that using the Quick Select Tool.
And making sure that I have the knitting needle layer selected I'm going to
make a really quick selection here.
And you can use any selection tool you like, just use your favorite selection
tool.
I'm thinking the Quick Select Tool is probably a reasonably good option here.
I'm going to click on my layer and now I'm going to fill the layer mask. What I want
to do is to remove these areas from it, so I want to fill it with black,
target the mask,
Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac fills the
mask with this color.
And now if I press Ctrl D to deselect the selection you can see that we
now have our knitting needles back in. If we wanted to we can also paint on this
layer, so if I have a little bit of
work to do here I can do to that by just painting on the mask layer just to
perfect
that selection anywhere I see that
I'm getting a bit of unwanted blue in my knitting needles. So the selective color
option is a good one to have a look at
when you're going to try and change colors in an image.
And as we've done in previous color change videos one of the things that
you may want to consider
is to see if the
Color Blend mode gives you any better result than the Normal blend mode, so
we'll just try with Normal
and then try with Color.
And either of those is going to be just fine. You can see if your mileage
is going to be better with one or the other but
this is the original image and this is the recolored image using Selective
Color in Photoshop.
Thank you for joining me for this video. I'm Helen Bradley.
Look out for more of my Photoshop, Illustrator and other video tutorials
on this YouTube channel.